Why arent their efforts to create "autonomous only" traffic managment scenarios, where people drive into a given, known area, and the area then takes control of managing the traffic and vehicles. Such that you relinquish control of the vehicle to that area's control system, with your destination stated and then your vehicle is managed accordingly.
For example, a parking lot for a really large venue with an autonomous valet system.
YOu drive up and get out and then the system takes over your car and drives off iwth it and parks it and you recall it when needed...
Or managing traffic in a very heavily trafficed bottle-neck of a grid; such as the baybridge merging egress from SF financial district.
If you put in your destination, and join the group, all the cars could then be managed for getting onto the bridge more rapidiously ...
Autonomous doesnt need to drive me from SF to LA, but it would be great if an autonomous hive mind could get all the cars to up throughput in given situations, no?
That seems to match the right tool (AI driving) to the right job (well-defined, well-controlled situations).
I seem to recall that similar ideas go back to the early 1990s, at least, for highways: Drive your car to the entrance ramp, plug in your destination, and the autonomous system takes it from there.
But for many of these things, such as the Bay Bridge or a highway, it seems like there is a simpler solution: Put the cars on a train and take them across by rail. I suspect I'm not the first person to think of it so I wonder why it's never been done (i.e., what problem I'm overlooking).
I suspect it's never been tried because the cost necessary to get from where we are now to there outweighs the potential benefit compared to more conventional transit solutions, carpooling, etc. Once automated driving gets to a point where it's possible to implement "autopilot-only" lanes (and doing so gets past the sociopolitical hurdles), I suspect those will come into play too, though.
Ive been picturing the rail problem for some time as well.
Not just for cars, but also for cargo... just have a constant gondola-like conveyer that detaches a platform from the line to slow it enough to allow for cargo to get on, then re-zip-it backinto the line and speed it along, de-rail it once it hits its exit/location...
ideally though, in cities, there would be no surface streets and all cars would have their own level below that of bikes pedestrians.
What would SF look like if a superstructure was built above all streets and all pedestrian and bike traffic was moved up there? (sure, SF may be a poor example, so just select [city])
Look at Singapore's vast underground connecting malls between facilities. Those are pretty amazing.
> What would SF look like if a superstructure was built above all streets and all pedestrian and bike traffic was moved up there?
The street level would be dark and storefronts would become difficult to access. If the stores moved up to the 2nd floor (a massive transformation of real estate, probably greatly reducing available living space), what would go on the first level? Not many people would want to live in the dark.
Besides, the best integrated transport solution in the world already exists in places like Utrecht, Groningen and Assen thanks to reforms that started decades ago.
The dynamics of mine development show interesting parallels with tech, actually.
Lots of mines start from little companies searching for a possible ore body (the idea or market fit), then raising money to perform a closer survey (seed funding). If the closer geological work is promising they often obtain a lease (patents or other IP).
At this point it goes one of two ways. Either they raise enough money to start and operate the mine themselves (series A, B etc, leading to an IPO) or they sell the prospect to a major company.
Then the newly-minted millionaires, who know a lot about mining, invest in the next crop of junior miners.
So as with tech there are conceptual, exploratory, growth and liquidity phases, followed by a process of reinvestment.
I remember realising this when living in Perth and being frustrated that, with quite literally billions of dollars sloshing around the city looking to invest, you'd be hard-pressed to pitch anything smarter than a brochureware website to the local investment class.
There were other structural problems. Stock options are not A Thing for various legal reasons. Failure in starting a high-risk business is a bit of a black mark. There are VCs but so much of their money came from governments trying to jump-start a market that they were about as risk-taking as a loans officer at a bank (what government wants "10 MILLION WASTED ON PHONE APPS" as a headline?).
Meanwhile the super funds are collectively sitting on trillions of dollars[0] and investing an absurdly dumb fraction of it in the ASX. Putting just 0.5% of their holdings into VC would unlock tens of billions of dollars of potential investments.
For which, hey, VCs who lurk here and want to raise a fund: go talk to the Australian superannuation industry. It is a massive pool of underperforming cash languishing in the same dozen public companies and, because Australian law forces all Australians to set aside at least 9.5% of income for retirement, the industry will never stop having incoming funds. There will always be new money to raise[1] and it will probably the 2nd largest pool of pension investments sometime in the next 10-15 years.
I will accept finder's fees and/or massively remunerative job offers as reward for this insight.
Well TCP doesn't do collision avoidance, it's a link layer thing. And on Ethernet, it is collision detection on the shared medium. Wireless does avoidance due to the hidden terminal problem.
Neither of these models is really analogous to cars on the road.
But applying collision detection and exponential back off in road traffic is a "fun" thought experiment.
A more apt model would be critical sections and semaphores from concurrent programming. Which is named after a collision avoidance scheme used to control trains. And we all know how difficult concurrent programming can be. I don't want traffic with deadlocks, starvation, busy waiting or live locks.
Well this would mean collaboration between autonomous car manufacturers to build a common protocol. And this does not fit with their business model of getting massive investment on the grounds of potentially being the first player on the market.
I don't think there is any possibility of large scale autonomous driving without a shared control infrastructure. Autonomous driving will only work as long as autonomous cars are a small minority.
As soon as they stop being in the minority, some shared control infrastructure is necessary.
Case in point: 4 cars arriving in a no-lights 4 way intersection simultaneously will cause a deadlock. A tie breaking scheme requiring some form of communication is necessary.
Not just between car manufacturers, but also between the cars and the area conrol system. Basically, all car manufacturers whould have to agree on a common API that allows the control system to take over, with full access to sensors and drive controls. A manufacturer could not simply refuse to implement the API, because this would effectively make their cars unable to use certain parts of the road network.
Even if manufacturers would somehow manage to agree on an API, it could then be "abused" by competitors or accessory vendors to sell their own customized car assistants, which would instantly work with any car brand - without them having to negotiate with the manufacturers.
I fear we will sooner have a usable open IoT standard than manufacturers giving up that level of control.
Why arent their efforts to create "autonomous only" traffic managment scenarios, where people drive into a given, known area, and the area then takes control of managing the traffic and vehicles. Such that you relinquish control of the vehicle to that area's control system, with your destination stated and then your vehicle is managed accordingly.
For example, a parking lot for a really large venue with an autonomous valet system.
YOu drive up and get out and then the system takes over your car and drives off iwth it and parks it and you recall it when needed...
Or managing traffic in a very heavily trafficed bottle-neck of a grid; such as the baybridge merging egress from SF financial district.
If you put in your destination, and join the group, all the cars could then be managed for getting onto the bridge more rapidiously ...
Autonomous doesnt need to drive me from SF to LA, but it would be great if an autonomous hive mind could get all the cars to up throughput in given situations, no?